my brother served in Northumbria Police for over 30 years, he spent the last five years or so as an instructor at the police training school in Durham and told me before he retired that many forces had dropped their standards quite alarmingly, some trainees even struggling to spell and were not the brightest. Worst case - a woman of African origin whose first language was a tribal dialect and second language was poor French, virtually no English, they employed a language tutor to coach her in the evenings; after all that added expenses she was still sacked before the end of the course. What a waste of money just to demonstrate they were not racist or anti femenist etc.